Steve Farrugia

Help fund Pivot to AI’s work — send a few dollars to keep the stories and videos coming It’s that time again when I ask you to send money to Pivot to AI. Help keep the stories coming daily! Here is how to send money: The Patreon is here. Sign up for $5 a month today! Less th…

Good afternoon, it's begging season! This is what I have for a living right now! Deep insights into the structure of the AI bubble and also point-and-laugh shitposts, daily! And videos! Please join the Patreon! Your $5 a month will help so much! We got T-shirts too!

pivot-to-ai.com/2025/07/27/h...

if we're honest with ourselves, jira is basically unfit for purpose out of the box, and completely unfit for purpose once someone configures it

theoretically it can track bugs, but in practice it's used to provide visibility or insight into a team's performance, and whoo boy does it suck ass

We wouldn't spend any time in it if it wasn't imposed on us. We are a captive audience to it all

WE SPEND TIME IN PRODUCTIVITY SOFTWARE BECAUSE ITS ALL ENTERPRISE SAAS BULLSHIT!

How to Read an "AI" Press Release — Sonja Drimmer Every so often someone like Mark Zuckerberg or Sam Altman will dribble out some unadorned text, announcing with stentorian certitude the advent of a new world that their latest product will avail. Zuc...

here's a useful critical annotation of zuck's "superintelligence" memo sonjadrimmer.com/blog-1/2025/...

I was sent on a training course by my employer at the time and I remember enjoying it but the project I was training for fell through and I never really had a chance to flex the skills.

somewhere, SOMEWHERE, I have an XSLT certification in a plastic sleeve

that sounds like a fair disturbance. I hope you can have a nice summer break to get back into it

oh great!

techmeme headline: Zuckerberg says superintelligence is in sight, and, when personal superintelligence comes, context-aware devices like glasses will become our primary computers

what's that @hypervisible.bsky.social quote about how every future envisioned by a tech company is worse than the last?

ok, no more reposting my own stuff till after my holiday

YouTube video by fasterandworse Dispatch #30: Belief Before Purpose

Dispatch #30: Belief Before Purpose

The purpose doesn't really matter

Video: www.youtube.com/watch?v=y1Te...

Podcast: pnc.st/s/faster-and...

1/x

A lot of conversations I have with software developers reveal a fundamental causal reasoning fallacy around access. Their stance is frequently: "I had interest, and I succeeded, so interest is the driver of success."

The real comparison is how many people had interest and didn't succeed anyway

Quite apart from the nightmare surveillance hellscape of it all, this is going to lead to so much messed up stuff that kids do to each other, y'all just don't even understand

I didn’t know rabbits liked trampolines, but then again…..

I think about the joy of managing to squeeze out a paragraph of clarity and see people respond to it and I can't imagine the deflation I'd feel if I knew I used AI to write it.

follow up album "Sales Leads Generation"

I, too, am riddled with ADHD and go to a weekly writing meetup which helps because I'm there for that. But there are so many people I see there using chatgpt and it scares me

In my last video I talked about computation being the predetermined means for satisfying whatever purpose it can be applied to.

In this one I go further to say that the purpose doesn't really matter when there is a belief that the means (AI/computation) can solve ANY problem.

2/x

Being anti-AI isn’t ableist. Just to be clear.

LLMs are not a tool that helps people express their own thoughts when they couldn’t otherwise. AI “art” is not an accommodation to allow disabled people to realize their vision. It’s a bad book report that steals from everyone else.

Skechers is making kids' shoes with a hidden AirTag compartment | TechCrunch Skechers launches kids' shoes with built-in AirTag holder.

“Inside the heel of the shoe, a small insert can be lifted to reveal the compartment. Then, parents can track the location of their child — or, at least their child’s shoes.”

As an artist, it makes me mad to hear software designers in my field talking about use cases.

Art is about going where nobody’s gone before, exploring new territories without knowing first what you’re gonna do, improvising and relying on serendipity.

We don’t use, we play.

When the ultimate problem of an uninhabitable planet is believed to be solvable by AI then AI is seen as the solution to all problems.

There is no more thought about the satisfaction of purposes.

In the eyes of an AI believer, purposes exist to satisfy their belief in AI.

4/x

A CEO saying their AI will solve climate change doesn’t have a bin full of scrunched up papers with failed ideas for a solution. That’s the very work they don’t want to do. The hard work. The design work.

Even if their climate concerns are genuine, it's still anti-design.

3/x

don't hold back!

bsky.app/profile/spav...

This entire product is the epitome of "use case thinking." Someone came up with a cool little user journey for how a person might take a meeting in their car, and everyone decided that because it could be done, it should be done.

Faster and Worse Quick 3-5 minute dispatches which focus on a single idea or concept related to tech product design

oh interesting! I'll check if I can switch it around

I also publish it as a podcast too, if you're interested

pnc.st/s/faster-and...

Microsoft spent decades convincing the public that it was a necessary security practice to keep current with software updates. Now they're busily tearing that work down by using updates to automatically impose unwanted and unsafe bullshit on people.
Sundar Pichai is like the RFK Jr of software

This points to the fundamental flaw in Canada’s AI policy — and by extension the government’s overall economic and social policy since they want to put AI in everything.
They’re starting with a solution rather than with an analysis of the problems. It’s a recipe for bad policymaking.